Why Google Scholar makes me roll my eyes

Here's part of the latest Google Scholar alert I received for scholarly articles on "Yellowstone National Park." Note the authors:


B. Bear, M. Lions, P. Safety, and E.E. Home (that is, the home page for the Encyclopedia of the Earth). Add the fact that none of those sites is "scholarly," unless you're writing a report for middle school. I still use Google Scholar for passive searches, or to look for particularly obscure citations. But as a discovery tool, they have a long way to go.

Unsurprising news to librarians

From Inside Higher Ed:

“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she [Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas] said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

And from the New York Times:

A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results.

Young people today use technology, but it doesn't mean they understand what they're doing, anymore than driving a car makes me an auto mechanic (and it doesn't, not one bit). But it may be unfair to pick on the youngsters: their elders once trusted Walter Cronkite and now they give that same uncritical allegiance to Rush Limbaugh. Information assessment is a crying need ... and I'm seeing librarians, knowing they can't survive as curators of books, eager to take on this task that almost no one else wants to do.

A word is worth a thousand pictures

I'm reading the Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and I come across the following diagram:



Got it? Crystal clear, isn't it? Aren't you glad you didn't have to wade through a dozen paragraphs of text to get the point?

Oh, wait. You didn't get the point? Maybe the accompanying text will help you out:

Choices available to decision makers are conditioned by core attributes common to all preserved digital assets and those that apply only within specific contexts.

Okay, that helps. We're talking about preserving digital assets, which wasn't at all obvious before. And the point? It's that, when making decision regarding preserving digital materials, some of the factors you consider will be unique to your specific situation, but there are other factors that are true of pretty much all digital preservation.

That's a bit obvious, but a valid introduction to the real point: identifying the "core attributes," those things that all preservation will have in common and so you might as well be aware of right from the start. In this case,

Preserved digital assets share four essential attributes as economic goods.

1. The demand for digital preservation is a derived demand.
2. Digital materials are depreciable durable assets.
3. Digital assets are nonrival in consumption and create a free-rider
potential.
4. The digital preservation process is temporally dynamic and pathdependent.

The most significant point is #3, the nonrivalrous consumption. That's a key difference between digital goods and physical goods.

I just wish to Gog or Hell or whatever that people could make their points without those damned relational diagrams which add not one whit of clarity to the text. In fact, I'm more often slowed down trying to figure out what is supposed to be so damned significant about placing bubbles to the left or right and drawing lines between them. There's some sort of a relationship, but drawing a line doesn't tell me what it is. Drawing arrows instead of lines is usually less helpful than the writer imagines. In this example, why does the "context-specific" attributes sit between the "core attributes" and the "choice variables," and not the other way around? It would make just as much sense to say that the context-specific attributes are mediated by the core attributes as vice versa. Perhaps that's because neither formulation manages to say much at all.

I see these diagrams everywhere and it's very rare that I find one worth the time to look at it, let alone the time to construct it. They say nothing that the text doesn't say more clearly and often in less page space. Can't we be done with this ridiculous fad?

Sigh. Okay, back to reading the report so I can gather the real information contained therein - in the text.

Quick reference

I just learned about a nifty new reference resource from Michael Heath, in a comment at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. It's a Firefox add-on that allows you to hover over or highlight a piece of text in your browser and instantly get a pop-up description from answers.com. Here's what it looks like:


I showed this to a couple of coworkers and they were suitably impressed, although we couldn't help musing over our declining patience in the internet age. It's true - even though I can look up almost anything by opening a new browser tab and running a Google search, I'm excited to find something that will save me all that time (!) by letting me pop up a cursory definition in the same window. On the other hand, how often did I run to the dictionary or the encyclopedia, back in the good ol' days, when I came across something unfamiliar? Quite often - but not as often as I run those Google searches that usually land on Wikipedia or some dictionary site. And now, when I encounter an unfamiliar word or person, I can get a quick definition even faster than before, which means I'll probably go the effort of doing it more often. So, yeah, it panders to a certain laziness, but if I'm addressing my ignorance more frequently than before, isn't that a great thing?

Google, continued

This article at NYT has a nice quotation that puts Google into a more proper perspective:

Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia and a free-culture advocate, puts it this way: if the fight over digitization of books is like horse-and-buggy makers against car manufacturers, Google wants to be the road.

Addendum. And this just in, from UM Librarian Paul Courant.

But Google doesn’t have anything like a monopoly over access to information in general, nor to the information in the books that are subject to the terms of the settlement. For a start (and of stunning public benefit in itself) up to 20% of the content of the books will be openly readable by anybody with an Internet connection, and all of the content will be indexed and searchable. Moreover, Google is required to provide the familiar “find it in a library” link for all books offered in the commercial product.

***snip***

Of course I would prefer the universal library, but I am pretty happy about the universal bookstore.

Big Bad Google?

A coworker sent the office a link to this NYRB article, Google & the Future of Books, which I read in print yesterday (maybe a touch of Luddism, but I just love sitting in a restaurant or coffee shop with a copy of NYRB in hand). This part just annoyed me. Speaking of the recent settlement over the mass digitization project and copyright complaints, Darnton states:

"Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly--a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information."

That's just wrong. Google has no such thing. Google offers me nothing that I can't find in other ways, if I'm willing to give up the convenience that Google offers me. I could use Yahoo or any of a bunch of search engines for searching the internet; I can use MapQuest instead of Google Maps; I can find all the information available on Google Earth, although perhaps not aggregated so conveniently.

All those digitized books? I can already get all of that content, just not conveniently (hundreds of ILL requests, maybe? Big travel budget?). Google doesn't control that information any more than Ford controls my ability to travel; they just make it a lot easier to get what or where I want. It's so easy to find information nowadays, but that's something new under the sun. If only one company can offer us that new thing just now, it shouldn't be treated as if we were having something taken away from us.

LIttleSis

As a response to Big Brother, the Public Accountability Initiative has launched a new website called - naturally - LittleSis. LittleSis describes itself as "an involuntary facebook for powerful people." It's a data aggregator which takes lists of public officials, Fortune 1000 companies, lobbyists, and the like, and then traces their connections by noting who has shared membership in a group with other people in the database. As an example Henry Paulson is automatically linked to people who've also worked in the Treasury Department, Goldman Sachs, or the Nature Conservancy (didn't know that!).

LittleSis is intended to be nonpartisan and the automatic linking of names from various lists will go a long way in ensuring that it remains so. The bias they have is their antipathy to the link between economic and political power. So far, no Screen Actors Guild listings, but they particularly like to assemble lists of who a person has donated money to, and from whom they've received donations (of the kind that would show up on public lists, anyway). If SAG is an active enough lobbyer, they'll surely show up.

It's early and incomplete, but this site has great potential for helping investigative types of all stripes. It works more or less automatically, once a name or a list of names has been added to the database; names and lists can be added by any registered user in a wiki-like fashion. Therefore, it's techno-economically* viable. Having just finished reading Gellman's book about Dick Cheney, I'm keenly aware of the power of information and just how difficult it is to maintain control of it. Now the common man can mine data, too. A more transparent world is likely to be a better world.


[PS. Major blogging faux pas - I forgot to link to my source for this. I learned about LittleSis from if:book, a terrific blog where I routinely find postings that are creative, thoughtful, and substantive. Be sure to check it out.]

_____________
*Is that a word? Sounds like something Neal Stephenson or William Gibson might already have used.

Election map

I stumbled across this display of thematic mapping more or less by accident, but it's a nice discussion of how straightforward information doesn't necessarily lead to the clearest understanding.



From Mark Newman, Professor, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at UM.

EPA libraries

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
SHUTTERED EPA LIBRARIES OPEN DOORS TOMORROW AFTER TWO YEARS

Of course, the damage is not so easily undone:

This ends a 30-month campaign by the Bush administration to restrict availability of technical materials within EPA but leaves in its wake scattered and incomplete collections.

Learning

[I started to post on this article, then pulled it because it was unfair to make critical assumptions about Sarah Palin's knowledge before she'd had the chance to show what she's learned. After seeing the first clips of Palin's interview with Charles Gibson, where she displayed her understanding of foreign policy, I'm confident that my thought were right on target.]

E.J Dionne asks The Right and Wrong Questions for Palin

Here are two important paragraphs buried at the bottom of a story in today's New York Times:

"Aides traveling with Ms. Palin have reported back to associates that she is a fast study -- asking few questions of her policy briefers but quickly repeating back their main points -- who already has considerable ease and experience before cameras.



She asks few questions but likes to parrot back answers? She prefers “light preparatory materials” to “heavy briefing books?” And this is the person we want next in line to be president? It sounds as if she makes our current president seem hugely informed and intensely curious.

Sounds like she's prepping for a Bible Quiz, I thought.

One commenter to Dionne's article has this to say:

I've been in compressed learning environment, and that's exactly how I would respond. Why? Asking too many questions is a sign of someone who gets side tracked, and isn't a good use of time. Compressed briefing notes are much easier to absorb.

So how much has she absorbed? Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDdPnKjFhpA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLvowvK_9BY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khfCOMuWap0

Yeah. We've seen this before - the student who hasn't been to class all year and stayed up all night trying to cram at the last minute. There are times when you can skate by with a few names and slogans - sales meetings and political campaigns, for example. That "compressed learning" is sufficient if you, a) will never have to revisit the topic, or b) already have a grasp of the topic. A little learning is a dangerous thing.


On a more political note, take a look again at the third clip. About 0:59, Palin visibly brightens when she says, "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska!" Women's equality may have been set back 15 years - we pass up a competent woman like Hillary Clinton and then present someone who's hard to take seriously as a grownup.

More seriously yet, Palin says war should be a last resort, but seems to embrace military conflict in every tight situation that Gibson actually raises. Iran? Israel can bomb 'em any time they want. Russia? Of course we might have to fight 'em; why not? You have to suspect that she's not ad-libbing here and that worries me.

Google needs to learn archiving

I use Gmail and I especially like the way it handles trash: when you delete a message, it remains in the trash for 30 days, allowing rescue if you need it again before then. Nice - it's almost like a regular records schedule. But the trash is searchable only if you're looking in the trash folder. That is, you can search the trash, or you can search your Inbox + Archives, but not all three at once.

I can see why you wouldn't want the messages in your trash to show up in every search. They only stay around the 30 days as a measure of disaster avoidance. But there are so many messages that have a short, but highly relevant, lifespan and it would be nice to be able to put these in a folder that showed up in search results, but also purged itself without manual intervention. C'mon, Google! Learn something from the records managers!

New research tool

This looks like a terrific development in combining social networking with research: Mendeley is intended to compile an enormous bibliographical database comparable to Last.fm's database of music and tastes.

“As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

Lincoln Museum closing in Fort Wayne

Somewhat old news that I haven't commented on: The old Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne will close and the Lincoln Financial Foundation will seek new quarters for the collection, which happens to be the largest privately-owned collection of Lincoln materials in the world. The folks in Fort Wayne are no happier than you might expect them to be and are trying to find a way to keep the collection in Indiana at least.

If you discount the importance of Hoosier prestige, though, it's hard to see why the Lincoln Museum needs to stay in Indiana. The ACPL is probably one of the few community libraries that could actually take on such a project, but I don't think they have facilities and personnel already in place for this type of thing. I'm sure the ACPL and Indiana State Museum can do the job, but when Springfield or the Smithsonian already have high-level Lincoln collections, it'll be hard to compete. It's also hard to see a winning argument in the claim that keeping Lincoln materials geographically scattered is some kind of aid to researchers (although it is a defense against floods, fires, and the like).

Flexible behavior without sophisticated cognition

Children Learn Smart Behaviors Without Knowing What They Know

"Children learn implicitly. They don’t need complex conceptual knowledge to show evidence of smart, flexible behavior."

Living in a puzzle

An architectural designer builds a mystery into a Manhattan apartment

Identified photographs

I might have mentioned, while discussing who bears responsibility for ensuring the accurate identification of photographs in a repository, that the Library of Congress created a Flickr account which, when I checked today, had 3715 digitized photos. That's not so many, since LOC is trying to publish only the ones that are in the public domain. But they're also hoping that the general public can provide more information on the content of the pictures, too. In most cases, LOC already knows a lot, but they never know everything about even their own collection.

Three variations

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." - Charles Darwin

The "evidence" for ID

An ID apologist writing to the Eugene Register-Guard claims to be impressed with the "scientific evidence" and then proceeds to deliver five arguments that could have come straight from the 12th Century:

1) Something is eternal. If there had ever been absolutely nothing, that condition would have persisted.

2) Biological life is evidently not eternal, being represented by organisms that without exception come from similar temporarily living organisms and then die.

3) Matter-energy is evidently not eternal, as it inescapably spends itself with every energy transaction at a net cost to the whole system. This process cannot have gone on eternally, because it would culminate in the eventual “heat death” of the universe in some finite amount of time (barring the oscillating universe mythology that belongs somewhere beyond science fiction).

4) Our consistent experience is that mind manipulates matter, not vice-versa, suggesting that an eternal mind having formed matter is more plausible than matter having created information-rich structures such as the human mind. Here, and with the next point, the “design demands a designer” argument fits.

5) Our consistent experience is that every effect must have an adequate cause. Thus, the universe viewed as a sequence of causes and effects points back to a first cause which is itself uncaused (see point No. 1 above). Just as logically, the universe viewed as a single huge effect also requires a sufficient cause outside itself.

Abstract logic proceeding from first principles - you can argue your way to anything you like that way. Anything. That's why science was such an advance in knowledge. It involves accepting, once and for all, that the world is too complex to be understood by pure human cogitation, so you have no choice but to just look closer and see what it's actually doing.

Ironically, ID defenders argue that the world is too complex to be uncreated, but simple enough to be understood though pure reasoning. The record suggests otherwise. Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato were some smart guys and promoted thinking as a worthy activity, but I don't know that they left us with any knowledge. And who wants his doctor to be a follower of Galen's four-humors model?

System v. impressions

Here's an interesting test (via Cognitive Daily): can you tell when someone is faking a smile?

I scored 10/20 (no indication of how that compares with other people). Interestingly, I missed 9 of the first 13, then judged correctly on 6 of the last 7. Somewhere around halfway through, I decided that a sign of a fake smile was when the corners of the mouth moved up and out before the rest of the mouth moved. So I began watching exclusively for that clue and ignored any other impressions. It might have been chance, but that does turn out to be one of the cues that distinguishes a controlled smile from a spontaneous smile, and my score did improve dramatically. To see the other tells, you'll just have to take the test yourself.

Galileos are rare

Via The Island of Doubt comes this comment from Michael Tobis of Wired:

I'd like to caution especially my younger readers that you may be very smart, but you should assume that you are making a mistake if you find yourself thinking you are smarter than every scientist in the world put together. A feeling like that is wrong a million times for every time it's even half right.

Adolescents who fall into this trap too spectacularly have a hole to dig themselves out of. It's not a great way to enter adulthood, having been spectacularly and publicly wrong, but youthful indiscretions are often forgiven or forgotten.

If you have such a feeling of superiority too strongly as an adult the world will not treat you kindly. You will almost certainly be wrong, wrong in the sense that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong. Most likely you will be called a crackpot. It's suprisingly common to be possessed by this feeling of superiority but it is usually tragic. Science is a team sport.

Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it,"You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable."